There 's a story behind every song. Did you know that Sweet Home Alabama was the first Lynyrd Skynyrd song to use female backup singers? Perhaps you did. But did you know the band members never even met these women? Their parts were recorded separately. This is just one of many, many facts for one of many, many songs on the Songfacts database. Carl 'founder' Wiser was working for a Rock station in Hartford, Connecticut and did a show called "Breakfast with the Beatles." He looked up books, magazine articles and press releases to gather some information about the songs and this information was stored on a computer. Over time more and more songs were added . This was also about the time the Internet was making its presence felt. Some HTML lessons later, a "web site" was established for the radio station... a website that went online in 1999 under the name of Songfacts .
It started off as just an elite little site visited mostly by DJs and anyone who happened to stumble upon it. In 2002 Songfacts was featured as a Yahoo Pick! and that was enough to crash the server. Over one weekend the number of registered users nearly doubled from 800 to 1400. What followed were writeups in several newspapers, magazines and the buzz over the internet.
Songfacts' claim to fame is the fact that anyone is allowed to contribute to its fact database. What's more, these facts are then cross checked by a panel of experts and researchers before they are put up on the site. The Songfacts Forum is buzzing with music enthusiasts with the incredible ability to identify and provide information about songs given minimal detail. A monthly newsletter chronicles the ever expanding list of new songs added. Apart from facts about songs, a subsidiary of the site is Artistfacts which helps people learn about and contribute information for their favourite bands and artists. The staff at Songfacts has also interviewed a number of songwriters who shared the stories behind their songs. These interviews are up on the site as well. SF also features two great games - Song Fallacies and Lyrical Pursuit
